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Too slow, didn’t wait: The five modern causes of slow website loads

Let’s explore the causes of slow website loads. There are obviously some delays that are beyond our control — like the user being on a very slow mobile connection. However, for the most part, our website’s load time is entirely up to us.

For the most part, our website’s load time is entirely up to us as developers and administrators. We need to do everything possible to accelerate the experience, and in fact I would argue that load time may be the single most important aspect of your site. That’s especially true of your home page, but also of other pages, especially if there are deep links to them from search engines, other Internet sites, or your own marketing emails and tweets.

We used to say that the biggest cause of slow websites was large images, especially too-large images that are downloaded to the browser and dynamically resized. Those are real issues, even today, and you should optimize your site to push out small graphics, instead of very large images. Images are no longer the main culprit, however.

Read my recent article in the GoDaddy Garage, “Are slow website load times costing you money and pageviews?” to see the five main causes of slow website loads, and get some advice about what to do about them.

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Sauron hacks the Internet of Rings as a state sponsor of cyberterrorism

sauronBarcelona, Mobile World Congress 2016—IoT success isn’t about device features, like long-life batteries, factory-floor sensors and snazzy designer wristbands. The real power, the real value, of the Internet of Things is in the data being transmitted from devices to remote servers, and from those remote servers back to the devices.

“Is it secret? Is it safe?” Gandalf asks Frodo in the “Lord of the Rings” movies about the seductive One Ring to Rule Them All. He knows that the One Ring is the ultimate IoT wearable: Sure, the wearer is uniquely invisible, but he’s also vulnerable because the ring’s communications can be tracked and hijacked by the malicious Nazgûl and their nation/state sponsor of terrorism.

Wearables, sensors, batteries, cool apps, great wristbands. Sure, those are necessary for IoT success, but the real trick is to provision reliable, secure and private communications that Black Riders and hordes of nasty Orcs can’t intercept. Read all about it in my NetworkWorld column, “We need secure network infrastructure – not shiny rings – to keep data safe.”

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Wearable IoT technology is getting under my skin, thanks to bodyhacking

HannesSjöblad

CeBIT Preview, Hannover, Germany — It looks like a slick Jedi move, but it’s actually the Internet of Things. When Hannes Sjöblad wants to pay for coffee, he waves his hand in front of the pay station. When he wants to open a door, he waves his hand in front of the digital lock. When he wants to start his car, he waves his hand in front of the ignition.

No, he’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi saving two rebel droids. Sjöblad is a famous Swedish bodyhacker who has implanted electronics, including a passive Near-Field Communications (NFC) transmitter, into his own hand. So, instead of using his smartphone or smartwatch to activate a payment terminal, a wave of the hand gets the job done.

Speaking to a group of international journalists at CeBIT Preview 2016 here in Hannover, Sjöblad explains that he sees bodyhacking as the next step of wearable computing. Yes, you could use a phone, watch, bracelet, or even a ring to host small electronics, he says, but the real future is embedded.

Read more about Sjöblad’s bodyhacking in my story in NetworkWorld, “Subdermal wearables could unlock real possibilities for enterprise IoT.”

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Bimodal IT — safety and accuracy vs. speed and agility

gartner-bimodal-itLas Vegas, December 2015 — Get ready for Bimodal IT. That’s the message from the Gartner Application, Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). It wasn’t a subtle message. Bimodal was a veritable drumbeat, pounded home over and over again in keynotes, classes, and one-on-one meetings with Gartner analysts. We’re going to be hearing a lot about bimodal development, from Gartner and the industry, because it’s a message that really describes what many of us are encountering today.

To quote Gartner’s official definition:

Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

Gartner sees that we create and manage two different types of projects. Some, Mode 1, being very serious, very methodical, bet-the-business projects that must be done right using formal processes, and others, Mode 2, being more opportunistic, quicker, more agile. That’s not to say that Mode 1 projects can’t be agile, and that Mode 2 projects can’t be big and significant. However, we all know that there’s a big difference between launching an initiative to implement a Black Friday sale on our website or designing a new store-locator mobile app, vs. rolling out a GAAP-compliant accounting system or migrating critical systems to the cloud.

You might argue that there’s nothing revolutionary here with bimodal, and if you did, you would be right. Nobody ever claimed that all IT projects, including software development, are the same, and should be managed the same way. What Gartner has done is provide a clear vocabulary for understanding, categorizing, and communicating project differences more efficiently.

Read more about this in my story “Mode 1, Mode 2: Gartner Preaches Bimodal Development at AADI,” published on the Parasoft blog.

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How to handle difficult feedback without losing your cool

difficult-conversationsYour app’s user interface is terrible. Your business plan is flawed. Your budget is a pipe dream. Your code isn’t efficient. Clients are unhappy with your interpersonal skills. Your meetings are too long. You don’t seem to get along with your developers. You are hard to work with. You are being kicked off the task force because you aren’t adding any value. The tone of your e-mail was too informal. Your department is being given to someone else. No, we won’t need you for this project. No, we don’t need you at all.

We all get feedback. Usually it’s a combination of good and bad. There’s praise and helpful criticism. Sometimes the feedback is about our company, sometimes about our project, sometimes about our team, and sometimes, well, about us. Sometimes we take the feedback in good stride. Other times, we get hurt and angry—and don’t listen. Speaking for myself, I tend to get defensive when given feedback that’s less than glowingly effusive.

Own your feedback. A short paper published by Harvard Business Review, called“Difficult Conversations 2.0: Thanks for the Feedback,” can help.

“In the realm of feedback, the receiver—not the giver—is the key player in the exchange. Here’s how to become a world-class receiver,” write Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, founders of Triad Consulting Group. The pair teach negotiation at Harvard Law School, and have written a couple of great books, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Even When it is Off Base, Unfair, Poorly-Delivered, and Frankly, You’re Not in the Mood) and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.

I heartily recommend both of Stone & Heen’s books. For now, let me share some of the wisdom in the five-page paper, which is focused somewhat on feedback from managers, but which is broadly applicable to all types of feedback. Stone & Heen write:

By becoming a skillful receiver of feedback, you can achieve three important benefits:

• Take charge of your life-long learning: When we get better at receiving feedback, we take charge of our own learning and can accelerate our growth.

• Improve our relationships: The way we handle feedback has an impact on our relationships.

• Reduce stress and anxiety: For the more sensitive among us, there’s one more important benefit: getting better at receiving feedback reduces stress and anxiety.

The authors say that it’s only natural to evaluate feedback, determine what is accurate and inaccurate, and then focus on what we see as inaccurate:

You can find something wrong with just about any feedback you get. Maybe it doesn’t address the constraints you’re under, it’s outdated, biased, coming from only a few people, or only part of the story. The problem is, when we focus on what’s wrong with the feedback, we lose sight of what might be right about it; and there is also almost always something right about it.

They continue:

Receiving feedback well doesn’t mean that you always have to take the feedback or agree with the assessment. But it does mean engaging in order to first truly understand the feedback, and then deciding what to do about it.

We receive feedback every day. The feedback might be about us from our managers. It might be about products from customer comments left on an open forum, or sent via Twitter. Feedback can be elating—everyone loves a five-star review. It can also be painful and debilitating. As developers, techies, managers and humans, let’s get better at receiving it.

 

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Big Security, Big Cloud and the Big Goodbye

ddjSoftware-defined networks and Network Functions Virtualization will redefine enterprise computing and change the dynamics of the cloud. Data thefts and professional hacks will grow, and development teams will shift their focus from adding new features to hardening against attacks. Those are two of my predictions for 2015.

Big Security: As 2014 came to a close, huge credit-card breaches from retailers like Target faded into the background. Why? The Sony Pictures hack, and the release of an incredible amount of corporate data, made us ask a bigger question: “What is all that information doing on the network anyway?” Attackers took off with Sony Pictures’ spreadsheets about executive salaries, confidential e-mails about actors and actresses, and much, much more.

What information could determined, professional hackers make off with from your own company? If it’s on the network, if it’s on a server, then it could be stolen. And if hackers can gain access to your cloud systems (perhaps through social engineering, perhaps by exploiting bugs), then it’s game over. From pre-released movies and music albums by artists like Madonna, to sensitive healthcare data and credit-card numbers, if it’s on a network, it’s fair game.

No matter where you turn, vulnerabilities are everywhere. Apple patched a hole in its Network Time Protocol implementation. Who’d have thought attackers would use NTP? GitHub has new security flaws. ICANN has scary security flaws. Microsoft released flawed updates. Inexpensive Android phones and tablets are found to have backdoor malware baked right into the devices. I believe that 2015 will demonstrate that attackers can go anywhere and steal anything.

That’s why I think that savvy development organizations will focus on reviewing their new code and existing applications, prioritizing security over adding new functionality. It’s not fun, but it’s 100% necessary.

Big Cloud: Software-defined networking and Network Functions Virtualization are reinventing the network. The fuzzy line between intranet and Internet is getting fuzzier. Cloud Ethernet is linking the data center directly to the cloud. The network edge and core are indistinguishable. SDN and NFV are pushing functions like caching, encryption, load balancing and firewalls into the cloud, improving efficiency and enhancing the user experience.

In the next year, mainstream enterprise developers will begin writing (and rewriting) back-end applications to specifically target and leverage SDN/NFV-based networks. The question of whether the application is going to run on-premises or in the cloud will cease to be relevant. In addition, as cloud providers become more standards-based and interoperable, enterprises will gain more confidence in that model of computing. Get used to cloud APIs; they are the future.

Looking to boost your job skills? Learn about SDN and NFV. Want to bolster your development team’s efforts? Study your corporate networking infrastructure, and tailor your efforts to matching the long-term IT plans. And put security first—both of your development environments and your deployed applications.

Big Goodbye: The tech media world is constantly changing, and not always for the better. The biggest one is the sunsetting of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a website for serious programmers, and an enthusiastic bridge between the worlds of computer science and enterprise computing. After 38 years in print and online, the website will continue, but no new articles or content will be commissioned or published.

DDJ was the greatest programming magazine ever. There’s a lot that can be said about its sad demise, and I will refer you to two people who are quite eloquent on the subject: Andrew Binstock, the editor of DDJ, and Larry O’Brien, SD Times columnist and former editor of Software Development Magazine, which was folded into DDJ a long time ago.

Speaking as a long-time reader—and as one of the founding judges of DDJ’s Jolt Awards—I can assure you that Dr. Dobb’s will be missed.

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Attack of the six-rotor quadracopter photo drones

quadracopter-droneDrones are everywhere. Literally. My friend Steve, a wedding photographer, always includes drone shots. Drones are used by the military, of course, as well as spy agencies. They are used by public service agencies, like fire departments. By real estate photographers who want something better than Google Earth. By farmers checking on their fences. By security companies to augment foot patrols. And by Hollywood filmmakers, who recently won permission from the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to operate drones on a movie sets.

Drones can also be used for mischief, as reported by Nick Wingfield in the New York Times. His story, “Now, Anyone Can Buy a Drone. Heaven Help Us” described how pranksters fly drones onto sports fields to disrupt games and infuriate fans, as well as animal-welfare activists using drones to harass hunters and scare away their prey.

Drones are everywhere. My son and I were shopping at Fry’s Electronics, a popular Silicon Valley gadget superstore. Seemingly every aisle featured drones ranging in price from under US$100 to thousands of dollars.

A popular nickname for consumer-quality drones is a “quadcopter,” because many of the models feature four separate rotors. We got a laugh from one line of inexpensive drones, which was promoting quadcopters with three, four and six rotors, such as this “Microgear 2.4 GHz. Radio Controlled RC QX-839 4 Chan 6 Axis Gyro Quadcopter Drones EC10424.” I guess they never thought about labeling it a hexcopter—or would it be a sextcopter?

As drones scale up from toys to business tools, they need to be smart and connected. Higher-end drones have cameras and embedded microprocessors. Platforms like Android (think Arduino or Raspberry Pi) get the job done without much weight and without consuming too much battery power. And in fact there are products and kits available that use those platforms for drone control.

Connectivity. Today, some drones are autonomous and disconnected, but that’s not practical for many applications. Drones flying indoors could use WiFi, but in the great outdoors, real-time connectivity needs a longer reach. Small military and spy drones use dedicated radios, and in some cases, satellite links. Business drones might go that path, but could also rely upon cellular data. Strap a smartphone to a drone, and you have sensors, connectivity, microprocessor, memory and local storage, all in one handy package. And indeed, that’s being done today too. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a Samsung Galaxy S4!

Programming drones is going to be an exciting challenge, leveraging the skills needed for building conventional mobile apps to building real mobile apps. When a typical iPhone or Android app crashes, no big deal. When a drone app crashes, the best-case scenario is a broken fan blade. Worst case? Imagine the lawsuits if the drone hits somebody, causes an automobile accident, or even damages an aircraft.

Drones are evolving quickly. While they may seem like trivial toys, hobbyist gadgets or military hardware, they are likely to impact many aspects of our society and, perhaps, your business. Intrigued? Let me share two resources:

InterDrone News: A just-launched newsletter from BZ Media, publisher of SD Times. It provides a unique and timely perspective for builders, buyers and fliers of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles. Sign up for free.

InterDrone Conference & Expo: Mark your calendar for the International Drone Conference and Exposition, Oct. 13-15, 2015, in Las Vegas. If you use drones or see them in your future, that’s where you’ll want to be.

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Is the best place for data in your data center or in the cloud? Ask your lawyer

lawyer

Cloud-based storage is amazing. Simply amazing. That’s especially true when you are talking about data from end users that are accessing your applications via the public Internet.

If you store data in your local data center, you have the best control over it. You can place it close to your application servers. You can amortize it as a long-term asset. You can see it, touch it and secure it—or at least, have full control over security.

There are downsides, of course, to maintaining your own on-site data storage. You have to back it up. You have to plan for disasters. You have to anticipate future capacity requirements through budgeting and advance purchases. You have to pay for the data center itself, including real estate, electricity, heating, cooling, racks and other infrastructure. Operationally you have to pipe that data to and from your remote end users through your own connections to the Internet or to cloud application servers.

By contrast, cloud storage is very appealing. You pay only for what you use. You can hold service providers to service-level guarantees. You can pay the cloud provider to replicate the storage in various locations, so customers and end-users are closer to their data. You can pay for security, for backups, for disaster recovery provisions. And if you find that performance isn’t sufficient, you can migrate to another provider or order up a faster pipe. That’s a lot easier, cheaper and faster than ripping-and-replacing outdated storage racks in your own data center.

Gotta say, if I were setting up a new application for use by off-site users (whether customers or employees), I’d lean toward cloud storage. In most cases, the costs are comparable, and the operational convenience can’t be beat.

Plus, if you are at a startup, a monthly storage bill is easier to work with than a large initial outlay for on-site storage infrastructure.

Case closed? No, not exactly. On-site still has some tricks up its sleeve. If your application servers are on-site, local storage is faster to access. If your users are within your own building or campus, you can keep everything within your local area network.

There also may be legal advantages to maintaining and using onsite storage. For compliance purposes, you know exactly where the data is at all times. You can set up your own instruction detection systems and access logs, rather than relying upon the access controls offered by the cloud provider. (If your firm isn’t good at security, of course, you may want to trust the cloud provider over your own IT department.)

On that subject: Lawsuits. In her story, “Eek! Lawyers are Coming After Your Fitbit!,” Sharon Fisher writes about insurance attorneys issuing subpoenas against a client’s FitBit data to show that she wasn’t truly as injured as she claimed. The issue here isn’t only about wearables or healthcare. It’s also about access. “Will legal firms be able to subpoena your cloud provider if that’s where your fitness data is stored? How much are they going to fight to protect you?” Fisher asks.

Say a hostile attorney wants to subpoena some of your data. If the storage is in your own data center, the subpoena comes to your company, where your own legal staff can advise whether to respond by complying or fighting the subpoena.

Yet: If the data is stored in the cloud, attorneys or government officials could come after you, or try to get access by giving a subpoena to the cloud service provider. Of course, encryption might prevent the cloud provider from complying. Still, this is a new concern, especially given the broad subpoena powers granted to prosecutors, litigating attorneys and government agencies.

It’s something to talk to your corporate counsel about. Bring your legal eagles into the conversation.

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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I struggled with jQuery

hemingwaySEYTON
The tests, my lord, have failed.

MACBETH
I should have used a promise;
There would have been an object ready made.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Loops o’er this petty code in endless mire,
To the last iteration of recorded time;
And all our tests have long since found
Their way to dusty death. Shout, shout, brief handle!
Thine’s but a ghoulish shadow, an empty layer
That waits in vain to play upon this stage;
And then is lost, ignored. Yours is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of orphaned logic
Signifying nothing.

Those are a few words from a delightful new book, “If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript,” by Angus Croll. For example, the nugget above is “Macbeth’s Last Callback, after a soliloquy from Macbeth from William Shakespeare.”

Literary gems and nifty algorithms abide in this code-dripping 200-page tome from No Starch Press. Croll, a member of the UI framework team at Twitter, has been writing about famous authors writing JavaScript since 2012, and now has collected and expanded the entries into a book that will be amusing to read or gift this holiday season. (He also has a serious technical blog about JavaScript, but where’s the fun in that?)

Read and wonder as you see how Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code,” would code a Fibonacci sequence generator. How Jack Kerouac would calculate factorials. How J.D. Salinger and Tupac Shakur would determine if numbers are happy or inconsolable. How Dylan Thomas would muse on refactoring. How Douglas Adams of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fame would generate prime numbers. How Walt Whitman would perform acceptance tests. How J.K. Rowling would program a routine called mumbleMore. How Edgar Allen Poe would describe a commonplace programming task:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I struggled with JQuery,
Sighing softly, weak and weary, troubled by my daunting chore,
While I grappled with weak mapping, suddenly a function wrapping
Formed a closure, gently trapping objects that had gone before.

Twenty-five famous authors, lots of JavaScript, lots of prose and poetry. What’s not to like? Put “If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript” on your shopping list.

Let’s move from JavaScript to C, or specifically the 7th Underhanded C Contest. If you are a brilliantly bad C programmer, you might win a US$200 gift certificate to popular online store ThinkGeek. The organizer, Prof. Scott Craver of Binghamton University in New York, explains:

The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil. Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.

The specific challenge for 2014 is to write a surveillance subroutine that looks proper but leaks data. The deadline is Jan. 1, 2015, more or less. See the Underhanded C website; be sure to read the FAQ!

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The wisdom, innovation, and net neutrality of Bob Metcalfe

bob-metcalfeWashington, D.C. — “It’s not time to regulate and control and tax the Internet.” Those are words of wisdom about Net Neutrality from Dr. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, held here at the MEF GEN14, the annual conference from the Metro Ethernet Forum.

Bob Metcalfe is a legend. Not only for his role in inventing Ethernet and founding 3Com, but also now for his role as a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. (Disclosure: Bob is also a personal friend and former colleague.)

At MEF GEN14, Bob gave a keynote, chaired a panel on innovation, and was behind the microphone on several other occasions. I’m going to share some of his comments and observations.

  • Why didn’t WiFi appear earlier? According to Bob, radio links were part of the original work on Ethernet, but the radios themselves were too slow, too large, and required too much electricity. “It was Moore’s Law,” he explained, saying that chips and circuits needed to evolve in order to make radio-based Ethernet viable.
  • Interoperability is key for innovation. Bob believes that in order to have strong competitive markets, you need to have frameworks for compatibility, such as standards organizations and common protocols. This helps startups and established players compete by creating faster, better and cheaper implementations, and also creating new differentiated value-added features on top of those standards. “The context must be interoperability,” he insisted.
  • Implicit with interoperability is that innovation must respect backward compatibility. Whether in consumer or enterprise computing, customers and markets do not like to throw away their prior investments. “I have learned about efficacy of FOCACA: Freedom of Choice Among Competing Alternatives. That’s the lesson,” Bob said, citing Ethernet protocols but also pointing at all layers of the protocol stack.
  • There is a new Internet coming: the Gigabit Internet. “We started with the Kilobit Internet, where the killer apps were remote login and tty,” Bob explained. Technology and carriers then moved to today’s ubiquitous Megabit Internet, “where we got the World Wide Web and social media.” The next step is the Gigabit Internet. “What will the killer app be for the Gigabit Internet? Nobody knows.”
  • With the Internet of Things, is Moore’s Law going to continue? Bob sees the IoT being constrained by hardware, especially microprocessors. He pointed out that as semiconductor feature sizes have gone down to 14nm scale, the costs of building fabrication factories has grown to billions of dollars. While chip features shrink, the industry has also moved to consolidation, larger wafers, 3D packing, and much lower power consumption—all of which are needed to make cheap chips for IoT devices. There is a lot of innovation in the semiconductor market, Bob said, “but with devices counted in the trillions, the bottleneck is how long it takes to design and build the chips!”
  • With Net Neutrality, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission should keep out. “The FCC is being asked to invade this party,” Bob said. “The FCC used to run the Internet. Do you remember that everyone had to use acoustic couplers because it was too dangerous to connect customer equipment to the phone network directly?” He insists that big players—he named Google—are playing with fire by lobbying for Net Neutrality. “Inviting the government to come in and regulate the Internet. Where could it go? Not in the way of innovation!” he insisted.
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Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft is getting stuff done

satya-nadellaI like this new Microsoft. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft. Yes, the CEO needs to improve his public speaking skills, at least when talking to women’s conferences. Yet when you look at the company’s recent activities, what appears are lots of significant moves toward openness, a very positive focus on personal productivity, and even inventiveness.

That’s not to say that Microsoft is firing on all cylinders. There is too much focus on Windows as the universal platform, when not every problem needs Windows as a solution. There is too much of a focus on having its own mobile platform, where Windows Phone is spinning its wheels and can’t get traction against platforms that are, quite frankly, better. Innovation is lacking in many of Microsoft’s older enterprise products, from Windows Server to Exchange to Dynamics. And Microsoft isn’t doing itself any favors by pushing Surface Pro and competing against its loyal OEM partners—thereby undermining the foundations of its success.

That said, I like some of Microsoft’s most recent initiatives. While it’s possible that some of them were conceived under former CEO Steve Ballmer, they are helping demonstrate that Microsoft is back in the game.

Some examples of success so far:

  • Microsoft Band. Nobody saw this low-cost, high-functionality fitness band coming, and it took the wind out of the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear. The Band is attractive, functional, and most importantly, cross-platform. Of course, it works best at present with Windows Phone, but it does work with Android and iOS. That’s unexpected, and given the positive reviews of Band, I’m very impressed. It makes me think: If Zune had been equally open, would it have had a chance? (Umm. Probably not.)
  • Office Mobile. The company dropped the price of its Office suite for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and iPad to the best possible price: free. Unlike in the past, the mobile apps aren’t crippled unless you tie them to an Office 365 license for your Windows desktop. You can view, edit and print Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents; use OneNote; and even use the Lync communications platform. Whether Microsoft realized that mobile users are a different breed, or whether it saw the opportunity to use mobile as a loss leader, it’s hard to say. This change is welcome, however, and has added to Microsoft’s karma credit.
  • Microsoft Sway. Another “didn’t see it coming” launch, Sway is a new presentation program that will be part of the Office suite. It’s not PowerPoint; it’s geared toward online presentations, not slide shows. The company writes: “Sway’s built-in design engine takes the hassle out of formatting your content by putting all of it into a cohesive layout as you create. This means that from the first word, image, Tweet, or graphic you add, your Sway is already being formed for you. This is thanks to a lot of Microsoft Research technology we’ve brought together in the background. As you add more of your content, Sway continues to analyze and arrange it based on the algorithms and design styles we’ve incorporated.” That’s not PowerPoint—and it’s perfect for today’s Web and mobility viewing.
  • .NET Core is open source. Nadella said that Microsoft was committed, and the release of the .NET Core to GitHub is a big deal. Why did the company do this? Two reasons according to Immo Landwerth: “Lay the foundation for a cross-platform .NET. Build and leverage a stronger ecosystem.” Cross-platform .NET? That would indeed by welcome news, because after all, there should be nothing Windows-specific about the .NET sandbox. Well, nothing technical. Marketing-wise, it was all about customer lock-in to Windows.
  • Microsoft is removing the lock-in—or at least, some of the lock-in. That’s good for customers, of course, but could be scary for Microsoft—unless it ensures that if customers have a true choice of platforms, they intentionally choose Windows. For that to be the case, the company will have to step up its game. That is, no more Windows 8-style fiascos.

Microsoft is truly on the right track, after quite a few years of virtual stagnation and playing catch-up. It’s good that they’re back in the game and getting stuff done.

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Capriza’s clever mobility via HTML screen scraping

caprizaHTML browser virtualization, not APIs, may be the best way to mobilize existing enterprise applications like SAP ERP, Oracle E-Business Suite or Microsoft Dynamics.

At least, that’s the perspective of Capriza, a company offering a SaaS-based mobility platform that uses a cloud-based secure virtualized browser to screen-scrape data and context from the enterprise application’s Web interface. That data is then sent to a mobile device (like a phone or tablet), where it’s rendered and presented through Capriza’s app.

The process is bidirectional: New transactional data can be entered into the phone’s Capriza app, which transmits it to the cloud-based platform. The Capriza cloud, in turn, opens up a secure virtual browser session with the enterprise software and performs the transaction.

The Capriza platform, which I saw demonstrated last week, is designed for employees to access enterprise applications from their Android or Apple phones, or from tablets.

The platform isn’t cheap – it’s licensed on a per-seat, per-enterprise-application basis, and you can expect a five-digit or six-digit annual cost, at the least. However, Capriza is solving a pesky problem.

Think about the mainstream way to deploy a mobile application that accesses big enterprise back-end platforms. Of course, if the enterprise software vendor offers a mobile app, and if that app meets you needs, that’s the way to go. What if the enterprise software’s vendor doesn’t have a mobile app – or if the software is homegrown? The traditional approach would be to open up some APIs allowing custom mobile apps to access the back-end systems.

That approach is fraught with peril. It takes a long time. It’s expensive. It could destabilize the platform. It’s hard to ensure security, and often it’s a challenge to synchronize API access policies with client/server or browser-based access policies and ACLs. Even if you can license the APIs from an enterprise software vendor, how comfortable are you exposing them over the public Internet — or even through a VPN?

That’s why I like the Capriza approach of using a virtual browser to access the existing Web-based interface. In theory (and probably in practice), the enterprise software doesn’t have to be touched at all. Since the Capriza SaaS platform has each mobile user log into the enterprise software using the user’s existing Web interface credentials, there should be no security policies and ACLs to replicate or synchronize.

In fact, you can think of Capriza as an intentional man-in-the-middle for mobile users, translating mobile transactions to and from Web transactions on the fly, in real time.

As the company explains it, “Capriza helps companies leverage their multi-million dollar investments in existing enterprise software and leapfrog into the modern mobile era. Rather than recreate the wheel trying to make each enterprise application run on a mobile device, Capriza breaks complex, über business processes into mini ones. Its approach bypasses the myriad of tools, SDKs, coding, integration and APIs required in traditional mobile app development approaches, avoiding the perpetual cost and time requirements, risk and questionable ROI.”

It certainly looks like Capriza wins this week’s game of Buzzword Bingo. Despite the marketing jargon, however, the technology is sound, and Capriza has real customers—and has recently landed a US$27 million investment. That means we’re going to see a lot of more this solution.

Can Capriza do it all? Well, no. It works best on plain vanilla Web sites; no Flash, no Java, no embedded apps. While it’s somewhat resilient, changes to an internal Web site can break the screen-scraping technology. And while the design process for new mobile integrations doesn’t require a real programmer, the designer must be very proficient with the enterprise application, and model all the pathways through the software. This can be tricky to design and test.

Plus, of course, you have to be comfortable letting a third-party SaaS platform act as the man-in-the-middle to your business’s most sensitive applications.

Bottom line: If you are mobilizing enterprise software — either commercial or home-grown — that allow browser access, Capriza offers a solution worth considering.

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Despairing of the “brogrammer” world, thanks to GamerGate

gamergateIt’s hard being a female programmer or software engineer. Of course, it’s hard for anyone to be a techie, male or female. You have to master a lot of arcane knowledge, and keep up with new developments. You have to be innately curious and inventive. You have to be driven, you have to be patient, and you have to be able to work swiftly and accurately.

Far too often, you have to work in a toxic culture. Whether in person or online, newbies get hazed and harassed. Men are verbally abused, certainly, in many software engineering organizations — there’s no room in many techie hangouts for wimps. However, women are almost always abused worse, and while men can learn to fight back, women are harassed in ways that are truly sickening.

Men are insulted and called names. Women receive death threats.

I’ve written about the challenges facing women in technology many times over the past decades. One recent column was “Fight back against the ugly ‘brogrammer’ trend,” written in May 2012. Yet I am continually astonished (in a bad way) by how terribly women are treated.

A recent example is what’s being called GamerGate. That where a number of prominent women gamers – including some game developers—have been attacked online. Several women have reported receiving very explicit threats, which have included disclosures of their home addresses. At least two women, game developer Zoe Quinn and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, have apparently fled their homes.

For background on this appalling situation, see Nick Wingfield’s story in the New York Times, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.”

What can we do? Other than say, “This isn’t right,” it’s hard to be sure. I don’t know if anyone I know is involved in these sorts of threats. I am unsure if any readers here are involved in creating this culture of misogyny and fear. But I do know that in the broad world, anti-bullying, anti-hazing and anti-harassment programs apparently don’t work, or certainly don’t work for long.

Indeed, GamerGate has become a distraction. The discussion of GamerGate itself (which thrives on Twitter on with the hashtag #GamerGate) has seemingly overridden the bigger discussion about how women engineers, or women in the technology industry, are treated.

Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of the gaming news/reviews site Polygon, has written a strong article about GamerGate, in which he writes,

Video games are capital “C” Culture now. There won’t be less attention, only more. There won’t be less scrutiny. There certainly won’t be less diversity, in the fiction of games themselves or in the demographics of their players. What we’re in control of is how we respond to that expansion, as journalists, as developers, as consumers. Step one has to be a complete rejection of the tools of harassment and fear — we can’t even begin to talk about the interesting stuff while people are literally scared for their lives. There can be no dialogue with a leaderless organization that both condemns and condones this behavior, depending on who’s using the hashtag.

GamerGate is evil. Perhaps harassment of women in the gaming industry is worse than in other technical fields. However, we should know, men and women alike, that despite the good work of groups like Women in Technology International and the Anita Borg Institute, the tech world is frequently hostile to women and tries to drive them out of the industry.

Alas, I wish I knew what to do.

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Next steps for Hewlett-Packard post-split

Neineil-sedakal Sedaka insists that breakin’ up is hard to do. Will that apply to the planned split of Hewlett-Packard into two companies? Let’s be clear: This split is a wonderful idea, and it’s long overdue.

Once upon a time, HP was in three businesses: Electronics test equipment (like gas spectrometers); expensive, high-margin data center products and services (like minicomputers and consulting); and cheap, low-margin commodity tech products (like laptops, small business routers and ink-jet printers).

HP spun off the legacy test-equipment business in 1999 (forming Agilent Technologies) and that was a win-win for both Agilent and for the somewhat-more-focused remainder of HP. Now it’s time to do it again.

There are precious few synergies between the enterprise side of HP and the commodity side. The enterprise side has everything that a big business would want, from high-end hyperscale servers to Big Data, Software Defined Networks, massive storage arrays, e-commerce security, and oh, lots of consulting services.

Over the past few years, HP has been on an acquisitions binge to support its enterprise portfolio, helping make it more competitive against arch-rival IBM. The company has snapped up ArcSight and Fortify Software (software security); Electronic Data Systems (IT services and consulting); 3PAR (storage); Vertica Systems (database analytics); Shunra (network virtualization); Eucalyptus (private and hybrid cloud); Stratavia/ExtraQuest (data center automation); and of course, the absurdly overpriced Autonomy (data management).

Those high-touch, high-cost, high-margin enterprise products and services have little synergy with, say, the HP Deskjet 1010 Color Printer, available for US$29.99 at Staples. Sure, there’s money in printers, toner and ink, monitors, laptops and so on. But that’s a very different market, with a race-to-the-bottom drive for market share, horrible margins, crazy supply chain and little to differentiate one Windows-based product from another.

Analysts and investors have been calling for the breakup of HP for years; the company refused, saying that the unified company benefitted from an economy of scale. It’s good that CEO Meg Whitman has acknowledged what everyone knew: HP is sick, and this breakup into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. is absolutely necessary.

Is breaking up hard to do? For most companies it’s a challenge at the best of times, but this one should be relatively painless. First of all, HP has split up before, so at least there’s some practice. Second, these businesses are so different that it should be obvious where most of HP’s employees, products, customer relationships, partner relationships and intellectual properly will end up.

That’s not to say it’s going to be easy. However, it’s at least feasible.

Both organizations will be attractive takeover targets, that’s for sure. I give it a 50/50 chance that within five years, IBM or Oracle will make a play for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, or it will combine with a mid-tier player like VMware or EMC.

The high-volume, low-margin HP Inc. will have trouble surviving on its own, because that is an area where scale helps drive down costs and helps manage the supply chain and retail channels. I could see HP Inc. being acquired by Dell or Lenovo, or even by a deep-pocket Internet retailer like Amazon.com.

This breakup is necessary and may be the salvation of Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise business. It may also be the beginning of the end for the most storied company in Silicon Valley.

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Big Data Divinations – Your business partner’s book about Big Data

Big Data Divination Pam BakerYou’ve gotta read “Data Divination: Big Data Strategies,” Pam Baker’s new book about Big Data.

Actually, let me change my recommendation. If you are a techie and you are looking for suggestions on how to configure your Hadoop installation or optimize the storage throughput in your NAS array, this isn’t the book for you. Rather, this is the book for your business-side manager or partner, who is looking to understand not only what Big Data is, but really really learn how to apply data analysis to business problems.

One of the challenges with Big Data is simply understanding it. The phrase is extremely broad and quite nebulous. Yet behind the overhyping of Big Data, there are genuine use cases that demonstrate that looking at your business’ data in a new way can transform your business. It is real, and it is true.

Bake is the editor of the “Fierce Big Data” website. She deconstructs the concept by dispensing with the jargon and the, well, overly smug Big Data worship that one finds in a lot of literature and pushed out by the vendors. With a breezy style that reflects her background as a technology journalist, Baker uses clear examples and lots of interviews to make her points.

What will you learn? To start with, “Data Divination” teaches you how to ask good questions. After all, if you don’t ask, you won’t learn anything from all that data and all those reports. Whether it’s predictive analytics or trend spotting or real-time analysis, she helps you understand which data is valuable and which isn’t. That’s why this book is best for the executive and business-side managers, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of your enterprise’s Big Data investments.

This book goes beyond other books on the subject, which could generally be summarized either as too fluffy and cheerleading, or as myopically focused on implementation details of specific Big Data architectures. For example, there is a lengthy chapter on the privacy implications of data gathering and data analysis, the sort of chapter that a journalist would write, but an engineer wouldn’t even think about.

Once you’ve finished with the basics, Baker jumps into several fascinating use cases: in healthcare, in the security industry, in government and law enforcement, in small business, in agriculture, in transportation, in energy, in retail, in manufacturing, and so on. Those are the most interesting parts of the book, and each use had takeaways that could apply to any industry. Baker is to be commended for digging into the noteworthy challenges that Big Data attempts to help businesses overcome.

It’s a good book. Read it. And tell your business partner, CIO or even CEO to read it too.

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You’ve got 30 seconds. Make the most of it

Graeme WarringThirty seconds. That’s about how long a mobile user will spend with your game before deciding if he or she will continue using it. Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. If you haven’t engaged the customer by then, forget it.

That’s according to Graeme Warring, COO of 2XL Games LLC, a game startup based in Phoenix. Speaking at an investor conference here today sponsored by AZ TechBeat, Warring explained that while mobile games are exploding, it’s getting harder and harder to make money at it.

One culprit that’s especially true with mobile games is that the new business model is free-to-play. That is, gamers can download the mobile app at no cost. They have, therefore, little or no emotional investment. They might try the game. They might not try it. They might play for 30 seconds or a minute. There’s no sense of guilt to drive them to engage with the software for hours or days, and then be inspired to use in-app payments to improve the gaming experience.

By contrast, consider a console game, such as for Sony’s PlayStation 4 or Microsoft’s Xbox One. A typical game might cost US$60. The gamer has done his/her research before making that purchase. Thanks to the emotional and financial investment, he/she is going to make a serious effort to play that game.

“It’s problem transference,” explained Warring. Who owns the problem of ensuring that the player gives the game a serious try? For an expensive console game, it’s the player’s problem. For a free-to-play mobile game, it’s your problem as the game developer.

Getting the player to engage requires an outstanding initial experience. Don’t require a steep learning curve; the era of preliminary in-game tutorials is long gone. Get the player involved instantly, and make it a fun and rewarding experience. Later, and only later, should you try to monetize through in-app purchases. Whether it’s a new weapon for a shoot-em-up, or grippier tires for a racing game, or more lives and candy and prizes, those become appealing only after the player is hooked and engaged.

Warring and other speakers at the AZ TechBeat conference made the point that the best-selling, top-revenue-producing games come from a small number of firms. They insist, however, that there are tremendous opportunities to make a smaller game, perhaps one that costs less than $5 million to create and market, and to make a profit from the investment.

Marketing is key. Expect to spend as much on marketing as on development, “and be prepared to burn through that budget,” the speakers insisted. That may mean social media; it may mean licensing arrangements. To that end, they suggest that instead of creating your own new brand and attracting a new audience, you may do better licensing an existing brand and a proven audience. Making a motorcycle racing game? License and tie it in with an existing motorcycle event, if you can. Such a tie in might be expensive, but it might bootstrap downloads and maybe even help attract investors.

That, in turn, will buy you 30 seconds. Make the most of it.

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Learning COBOL might be a great job move

mag-tapeOnce upon a time, back when dinosaurs roamed the planet, I learned COBOL. While I never wrote any deployed applications in the language, I did use it to teach an undergraduate course in computer science for business majors, back in the early 1980s. Those poor students, who submitted their programs on punch cards for an IBM System/370, complained that the class was the most time-consuming of their undergraduate studies, often requiring lots of late nights at the campus computer center.

Hint: If you are using a card punch, it’s important to have excellent typing skills.

Today, of course, COBOL is more likely to be a punchline. Sure, there was a resurgence of interest in the language about 15 years ago, when everyone was concerned about the Y2K problem. After that, legacy systems running COBOL disappeared from the public eye. Everyone would much rather use Java or C# or Python or Ruby or Objective-C; that’s where the jobs are, right?

Don’t be so quick to discount COBOL, especially if you are looking for a job, or think that you might be some day. There are lots of COBOL applications running all over the world, and more and more COBOL experts are retiring every day.

I’d like to share some information from one of the biggest COBOL vendors: Micro Focus. Bear in mind that Micro Focus’ interest is self-serving, but with that said, I find the information fascinating.

According to the company:

A poll of academic leaders from 119 universities across the world saw more than half (58%) say they believed COBOL programming should be on their curriculum, with 54% estimating the demand for COBOL programming skills would increase or stay the same over the next 10 years. That’s a far cry from today’s reality. Of the 27% confirming COBOL programming was part of their curriculum, only 18% had it as a core part of the course, while the remaining 9% made it an elective component.

The company has a lot of bullet points about COBOL, which I’ll share verbatim:

  • COBOL supports 90% of Fortune 500 business systems every day
  • 70% of all critical business logic and data is written in COBOL
  • COBOL connects 500 million mobile phone users every day
  • COBOL applications manage the care of 60 million patients every day
  • COBOL powers 85% of all daily business transactions processed
  • COBOL applications move 72,000 shipping containers every day and process 85% of port transactions
  • 95% of all ATM transactions use COBOL
  • COBOL enables 96,000 vacations to be booked every year
  • COBOL powers 80% of all point-of-sale transactions
  • There are 200 more COBOL transactions per day than Google + You Tube searches worldwide
  • $2 trillion worth of mainframe applications in corporations are written in COBOL
  • 1.5 million new lines of COBOL code are written every day
  • 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are developed every year
  • The total investment in COBOL technologies, staff and hardware is estimated at $5 trillion
  • An estimated 2 million people are currently working in COBOL

Micro Focus cites lots of sources: The Aberdeen Group, Giga Information Group, Database and Network Journal, The COBOL Report, SearchEngineWatch.com, Tactical Strategy Group, and The Future of COBOL report as sources for those points.

Again, this might mean job opportunities. FedTech Magazine reports:

In March [2014], the Office of Personnel Management released its “Strategic Information Technology Plan,” a vision for revamping the agency’s IT operations, including plans to automate paper-based processes, invest in data analytics and consolidate numerous databases. But maintaining the mainframe hardware and software systems that currently support retirement processes is expensive; according to the agency’s plan, OPM anticipates costs will increases 10 percent to 15 percent annually “as personnel with the necessary coding expertise retire and cannot easily be replaced.”

The United States military agrees. According to Terry Halvorsen, CIO of the Department of the Navy, it is often more cost-effective to maintain COBOL systems than to replace them:

In many cases, however, maintaining an older system that fully supports our mission makes more sense than upgrading it or buying a new system that runs the risk of degrading our mission and requires a large investment. The [Department of the Navy] and industry still use a programming language developed in 1959 to operate major business functions in finance and personnel. In fact, nearly three quarters of the world’s business transactions are done in that venerable language, COBOL. Now with an estimated 200 billion lines of code, it still works. Part of the reason for this is it’s an easy-to-use language, it is fast and it processes data quickly. It is in use worldwide and has proven so stable and reliable that many Fortune 500 companies—Capital One, for example—still hire and train COBOL programmers.

COBOL is easy to learn… and the jobs are there.

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They want to steal your data

bankamericard“My name is Patricia from the Bank of America fraud prevention department. This important message is for Mr. Alan Zeichick. We are calling to verify some potentially suspicious activity on your account. It is very important that we speak with you.”

Tuesday’s voicemail from my bank was short and simple. Nobody had pilfered a credit-card receipt or hacked into my account, the representative told me during our conversation. Rather, BofA had been notified by Visa (the credit card clearinghouse) that a retailer had been hacked, and many credit card numbers were stolen. Including mine. As of right now, my card was frozen; the bank will issue me a new card with a new number.

Who was the merchant? According to the BofA representative, Visa didn’t divulge that information due to an ongoing investigation. Nor did the representative know how many credit card numbers were stolen; all she knew what was that BofA was given a list of their bank’s customers who were affected.

These stories are coming far too often. Millions of cards were stolen in 2014 from diverse merchants like P.F. Chang’s China Bistro (a restaurant chain), Michaels Stores (art supplies), Sally Beauty (cosmetics), and Shaws (grocery stores). And those are only a few of the major vendors. Who knows how many smaller card thefts are either never reported, or aren’t deemed sufficiently juicy by the news media?

Some of you might be thinking, “We don’t take credit card numbers on our websites, so there’s no potential risk exposure.” Wrong. I am frequently astonished by the number of companies that maintain lots of customer data, and have that data pilfered. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards say that you should never store customer payment information. We’ve all seen that those standards are not followed, sometimes intentionally through neglect, and sometimes through flawed architecture, bad coding or lousy testing.

Let’s be clear: Encrypting browser communications does not protect your customers’ personal or financial information. If you are storing that information anywhere—in your data center, in the cloud—it is at real risk. The threats are active. Are your countermeasures active?

What is even more astonishing is that many of these thefts are of personal information stored on employees’ laptops. You may recall a high-profile case in 2013, where nearly 840,000 Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield customers had their information compromised when two laptops were stolen from the New Jersey-based health insurance company.

To quote from the Star Ledger’s story,

The stolen laptops were password-protected but had unencrypted data, Horizon said in a statement today. A subsequent investigation determined the computers may have contained files with personal information, including names, addresses, dates of birth, and, in some instances, Social Security numbers and limited clinical information, the insurer said.

How is that possible? No possible scenario should allow customer information to be downloaded onto a desktop or laptop or tablet or phone. Ever. Encrypted or not, the data should never leave the server.

Please tell me you aren’t storing credit card info in files that can be stolen. Please tell me  your company has actively sought to ensure that customer information can never ever ever be downloaded from servers.

Data theft is a nuisance, for cardholders like me, and for businesses like yours. Do you protect your customers’ information?

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What to do when, not if, your cloud goes down

azure-statusCloud-based development tools are great. Until they don’t work.

I don’t know if you were affected by Microsoft’s Azure service outage on Thursday, August 14, 2014. As of my deadline, services had been offline for nearly six hours. On its status page, Microsoft was reporting:

Visual Studio Online – Multi-Region – Full Service Interruption

Starting 22:45 13 Aug, 2014 UTC, Visual Studio Online customers may have experienced issues with latency and extended Execution times. The initial incident mitigated at approximately 14:00 UTC. During investigation at 13:52 14 Aug, 2014 UTC, engineering teams began receiving alerts for a separate issue where customers were unable to log in to their Visual Studio Online services. From 13:52 to 19:45 on 14 Aug, 2014 UTC, customers were unable to access their Visual Studio Online resources. Engineering teams have validated their mitigation efforts for both issues and have confirmed that full service has been restored to our Visual Studio Online users. These incidents are now mitigated.

My goal here isn’t to throw Microsoft under the bus. Azure has been quite stable, and other cloud providers, including Amazon, Apple and Google, have seen similar problems. Actually, Amazon in particular has seen a lot of uptime and stability problems with AWS over the past couple of years, though its dashboard on Thursday afternoon shows full service availability.

Let’s think about the broader issue. What’s your contingency plan if your cloud-based services go down, whether it’s one of those players, or a service like GitHub, Salesforce.com, SourceForge, or you-name-it? Do you have backups, in case code or artifacts are lost or corrupted? (Do you have any way to know if data is lost or corrupted?)

This is a worry.

In the case of the August 14 outage, the system wasn’t down for long — but long enough to kill a day’s productivity for many workers. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online blog has a little bit of insight into the problem, but not much. Posted at 16:56 UTC, Microsoft said:

The actual root cause is still under investigation, but initial investigation is indicating a contention in our core database seems to be causing blocking and performance issues in the services. Our DevOps teams have identified a couple of mitigation steps and currently going thru validations. We will provide an update as soon as we have a mitigation in place. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while working on resolving this issue

This time you can blame Microsoft for any loss of productivity. Next time the service goes down, if you haven’t made contingency plans, the blame is yours.

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Look to the intranet for shared corporate data — it’s a Big Data problem

Microsoft-SharePoint-Foundation-2010-logoWhere do your employees go to find shared data? If it’s external data, probably an external search engine, like Google (which apparently holds 67.6% of the U.S. market) or Bing (18.7%) or one of the niche players.

What about internal corporate data? If your organization uses a platform like Microsoft’s SharePoint, that platform includes a pretty robust search engine. You can use SharePoint to find documents stored inside the SharePoint database, or external documents linked to it, and conversations and informal data hosted by SharePoint. If you are familiar with a product called FAST, which Microsoft acquired in 2008, SharePoint’s search contains some elements of FAST and some elements of Bing. It’s quite good.

What if you are not a SharePoint shop, or if you are in a shop that hasn’t rolled SharePoint out to every portion of the organization?  You probably don’t have any good way for employees to find structured and unstructured documents, as well as data. You’ve got information in Dropbox. In Box.com. In Lotus Notes, maybe. In private Facebook groups. In Yammer (another Microsoft acquisition, by the way). In Ribose, a neat startup. Any number of places that might be on enterprise servers or cloud services, and I’m not even talking about the myriad code repositories that you may have, from ClearCase to Perforce to Subversion to GitHub.

All of those sources are good. There are reasons to use each of them for document sharing and collaboration and source-code development. That’s the problem. Like the classic potato chips advertisements say, you can’t only eat one.

Even in a small company, the number of legitimate sharing platforms can proliferate like weeds. As organizations grow, the potential places to stash information can grow exponentially, especially if there is a culture that allows for end users or line-of-business departments to roll out ad hoc solutions. Add mobile, and the problem explodes.

This is a governance problem: How do you ensure that data is accounted for, check that external sharing solutions are secure, or even detect if information has been stolen or tampered with?

This is a productivity problem: How much time is wasted by employees looking for information?

This is a business problem: How much money is wasted, or how much work must be duplicated or redone because data can’t be found?

This is a Big Data problem: How can you analyze it if you can’t find it?

The answer has to be a smarter intranet portal. In a recent essay by the Nielsen Norman Group, usability experts Patty Caya and Kara Pernice write that “Intranet portals are the hub of the enterprise universe.”

The trick is to discover it, index it, and make it available to authorized users—without stifling productivity. That includes data from applications that your developers are creating and maintaining.

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Microsoft’s bold ambition scares me

satya-nadellaMicrosoft has evolved considerably. It’s moved from its early days selling developer tools, or its era focusing on Windows and Office, or its run as a server software maker, or its first iteration as a cloud/online services company. Despite all the myriad changes, it’s always been true that Microsoft does not excel at innovation.

In fact, when the company focuses on innovation, it often misses with its products and pricing. Features are implemented badly, bugs proliferate, messages are muddled and strategy appears non-existent.

This confuses customers, annoys developers and frustrates partners.

When, by contrast, Microsoft focuses on execution, it does much, much better. Software and services are about getting the details right, and that means understanding the customers, not slamming out a bewildering product that has state-of-the-art technology but doesn’t make sense to anyone.

This is true whether you are talking about operating systems like Windows, or back-end products like Bing or SharePoint, or mobile phones. The new, innovative, visionary, ground-breaking products (or product upgrades) nearly always disappoint.

Reading new CEO Satya Nadella’s letter to his employees, I am concerned that Microsoft doesn’t understand that customers want excellent products. That means execution more than it means innovation.

Nadella’s letter, called “Bold Ambition & Our Core,” was published on July 10. Right up front, Nadella says, “The day I took on my new role I said that our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.”

That scares me. I think he misses the point.

Nadella writes,

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

What does it mean to reinvent productivity? I’m sure it means more than carrying around a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 device that tries to be both a notebook computer and a tablet, but doesn’t truly succeed in either configuration.

Nadella continues,

Productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides. We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences.

It’s a beautiful concept – but so far, Microsoft’s bread and butter has been specifically documents, spreadsheets and slides. Is he talking about SharePoint and Yammer?

In the 3,000-word missive, Nadella spends a lot of time talking about specific areas. He talks about “digital work and life experiences,” which are productivity enhancers designed for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. He talks about context-rich connections between experience, such as with the Cortana app on Windows Phone. He talks about the cloud, where

the combination of Azure and Windows Server makes us the only company with a public, private and hybrid cloud platform that can power modern business. We will transform the return on IT investment by enabling enterprises to combine their existing datacenters and our public cloud into one cohesive infrastructure backplane.

Nadella also talks about Xbox:

The single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world is gaming. We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation. Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox.

What’s missing from Nadella’s call-to-arms letter? You won’t read much specifically about Windows Phone, about notebooks and desktop computers, about desktop Windows, or even traditional Office.

You also didn’t see much about execution, about delivering excellent products. All I read is innovate, innovate, innovate. Ideas are nice, Mr. Nadella, but I’d like to see a company that actually delights its customers, instead of frustrating them with its latest upgrades.

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The future of computing: Android Everywhere

googletvGOOGLE I/O 2004, SAN FRANCISCO — What is Android? It’s hard to know these days, and I’m not sure if that’s good or not. We all know what happened when Microsoft began seeing Windows as a common operating system for everything from embedded systems to desktops to phones to servers. By trying to be reasonably good at everything, Windows lost its way and ceased being the best platform for anything.

Once upon a time, Android was a free operating system for smartphones, conceived of as a rival for Symbian and (believe it or not) Windows Mobile. Google purchased Android Inc. in 2005; the Open Handset Alliance launched in 2007; and the first smartphone running Android appeared in 2008. Today, Android-based phones dominate the market, with the most visible handset makers being Samsung and LG. Some estimates show that at the end of 2013, more than 81% of all smartphones were running Android.

From its origins in smartphones, it was natural that Android would expand to tablets. Although no Android tablet has emerged as a clear market leader, there are many manufacturers, from Samsung to Amazon to Google to Asus. While Android has decisively eclipsed Apple’s iPhone in the smartphone market, the iPad still defines tablets.

What else? Android is now an operating system for head-mounted displays, smartwatches, wearables, televisions and automotive entertainment systems.

We’re all familiar with Google Glass, which is based on Android. The company is working hard to recruit developers to build Glassware. This spring, Android announced Android Wear, which is described as “your key to a multiscreen world,” especially if one of those screens will be a smart watch. A few companies, including LG, Samsung and Motorola, have announced watches.

Remember Google TV? It was not a success in the market. The replacement, announced this week here at the annual Google I/O developer conference, is called Android TV. According to Google, “Thousands of apps in the Google Play Store are already optimized for TVs.”

Google is clearly interested in cars, and not only because it wants to build self-driving vehicles. A few aftermarket audio system makers have used off-the-shelf Android as the driver in replacement automotive head units. This week, Google announced Android Autoas a competitor to Apple’s iOS-focused CarPlay. As with smartphones, Google set up a vendor alliance — in this case, the Open Automotive Alliance — to developer industry specifications and to drive alliances with car manufacturers.

From the looks of things, Android is now intended to become a general-purpose operating system. Good for embedded, small-footprint, app-based, highly connected devices.

Google’s emphasis, though, isn’t on the hardware, but on that increasingly multiscreen world. With screens spanning the wrist, phone, tablet, head-mounted displays and televisions, Android looks to be everywhere. And that means that Google Play will be everywhere. Thus Google advertisements everywhere too. I mean, duh.

I guess that’s the future of computing: Android Everywhere.

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Don’t sign the non-compete agreement

gold-handcuffAre you covered by a non-compete agreement at your current employer? Are your workers covered by a non-compete? While non-competes may make your executives (and their attorneys) feel good, they may not be good for your company.

Non-compete agreements restrict where you can work after you leave your current employer. They might lock you out of taking another job in your industry for years—agreements of even up to five years are not uncommon. Of course, non-competes can dissuade competitors from recruiting you while you are still working. That’s not all: They could also scare away potential employers even if you lose your job due to a layoff or involuntary termination.

By restricting the free flow of employees from company to company, non-compete agreements limit employment options. They also can cut down on a vibrant culture of innovation and startups.

Why have non-compete agreements? One argument is that employers invest in hiring and training their employees, and don’t want to have those employees, once trained, snatched up by competitors. Another is that by virtue of their jobs, employees have access to intellectual property, and that the non-compete stops competitors from gaining ready access to that IP.

As you can imagine, information technology workers, including software developers, are often seen as key strategic assets and may find non-compete agreements a necessary evil. Programmers aren’t the only folks locked in by non-competes, though. A recent story by Steven Greenhouse in the New York Times, “Noncompete Clauses Increasingly Pop Up in Array of Jobs,” talked about a Boston-area teenager who couldn’t work at a summer camp in 2014 because the camp she worked at in 2013 had a 12-month non-compete agreement. Ugh.

Some states, including California, give more protections to employees than to employers, and non-compete agreements are often unenforceable. Some analysts believe that this worker-friendly environment contributes to the vitality of the area’s tech economy—see Sharon Wienbar’s blog post, “The Power of a Fluid Market: Employee Mobility Makes Silicon Valley Flow.”

Wienbar writes

A non-compete isn’t the only reason why the abundance of VC $$ remain in Silicon Valley but it is an important item to consider. In the technology landscape, talent can make or break a business and the more fluid the resources, the better the chance of building a viable business.

Other states are friendlier to business and uphold non-compete agreements. I would not like to work in that environment, personally. I’m not a fan of non-compete agreements and have never signed one or asked an employee to sign one. However, I recognize that in some locations, and in some companies, that’s the only way to get the job you want at the company you want.

Compelling arguments against such agreements are plentiful. Read Jeff Haden’s, “The Case Against Non-Compete Agreements,” published in Inc.; “Time to get rid of ‘noncompete’ agreements” by the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirshner; and Jon Zemke’s “To Compete or Non-Compete: Contracts That Make Michigan Less Competitive,” in Concentrate.

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Forget Big Data and worry about Bad Data

bad-dataTwo consulting projects this year have involved lots and lots of data. One was the migration of a very complex customer database and transaction logging system to a cloud-based CRM platform from a homegrown system. The other involved performing serious analytics on a non-profit’s membership system that had data spanning decades.

Both projects required incredible manual intervention in the data processing. Data came from different original sources and had wildly varying schemas. Some data was relational, and some was flat-file. Some of the data was clearly contradictory. Timestamps were missing on records. Valuable data was stored in comment fields. Documentation didn’t exist. Keys were lost. Fields were abandoned. Live data was mixed with archival data.

Both systems were a mess—but that wasn’t the problem. The issues I’m describing are the everyday result of messy software, evolving databases and the real world. Solving those challenges takes some effort, but we all know the importance of factoring data cleansing into any type of migration or analytics project, both in terms of time and of finances.

The real challenge is that most of the data was totally wrong. No resemblance to reality. That person never lived at that address. The relationships in the SQL database were not correct. Conventions were nonexistent. When data is being collected by many systems—and stored in many systems—over years and decades, this is what happens.

Yes, both projects were successful. However, we had to throw away a lot of data that would have added value to the organizations and their customers or members. Worse, we learned that both organizations had been using bad data for years, resulting in missed opportunities, less-than-ideal customer service, and flawed business planning.

Garbage in, garbage out. After all, if you are thinking about offering a new product or service, and are basing your decisions on bad data, you aren’t making a good decision. You are guessing.

What went wrong? It wasn’t in the migration and analytics projects. We went in, cleaned up the data best we could, and got out. It was a finite task and went as well as could be expected.

The root causes weren’t bad programming either, or poor database administration. In many IT shops, schemas change. Documents are lost. Corruption happens. Ideas are tried and abandoned. That’s simply what happens when data is kept past its sell-by data.

The failure is that nobody regularly (or ever) checked the data to make sure that it’s still good. Nobody performs period data hygiene. Nobody tested addresses, or eyeballed records to see if they made sense, or validated the databases against other sources (or even against themselves).

Data is a valuable corporate asset. In fact, when it comes to customer data and transaction records, data may be the single biggest asset of your company. Most companies work hard to ensure that their assets are solid. A manufacturer checks its raw materials and finished goods to ensure that they are as expected. Materials in warehouses are inventoried. Random samples are pulled from time to time, tested, and examined carefully.

When it comes to data, long-term quality is rarely a consideration. Data is stored and used. Is it checked? Rarely, if ever. We all know the benefits of Big Data for our business. What about the costs of Bad Data? Unknown, but real. I’ve seen this time and again. As Bad Data is used and reused, it will only get worse.

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It’s time to learn Swift

swift-chris-lattnerSAN FRANCISCO — I expected a new version of OS X, the operating system for Mac desktops and notebooks. I expected a new version of iOS, the operating system for iPhones and iPads. I did not expect a new programming language. Yet that’s what we got at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, held here this week. And I’m delighted.

Along with the previews of OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” and iOS 8, Apple showed Swift, a language that runs inside its familiar Xcode integrated development environment.

Swift is designed primarily for safety. As Apple puts it:

Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code. Variables are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, and memory is managed automatically. Syntax is tuned to make it easy to define your intent—for example, simple three-character keywords define a variable (var) or constant (let). The safe patterns in Swift are tuned for the powerful Cocoa and Cocoa Touch APIs. Understanding and properly handling cases where objects are nil is fundamental to the frameworks, and Swift code makes this extremely easy. Adding a single character can replace what used to be an entire line of code in Objective-C. This all works together to make building iOS and Mac apps easier and safer than ever before.

Obviously we have not had a chance to work with Swift directly. However, it appears to be a very easy language to learn, especially for developers who are used to Objective-C. It’s designed for Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch libraries, is built with the familiar and stable LLVM compiler, and creates the same runtime as Objective-C.

Apple says Swift programs are fast. The company claims that a complex object sort will run in Objective-C about 2.8x faster than in Python. But if you use Swift, it runs 3.9x faster.

Learn more about the Swift announcement, as well as a ton of new APIs, in Rob Marvin’s article, “Apple announces Swift programming language, new SDK and developer features at WWDC.”

A neat feature of Swift is what Apple calls “playgrounds,” where you can see how the code runs as you write it—without building a new version. That’s cool. Swift isn’t ready yet, but you can check out Apple’s preliminary documentation, including a tour and language guide.

Swift is a cross-platform language, if you define “cross platform” to mean “both of Apple’s platforms.” Yes, you can use Swift to write apps for OS X and for iOS, and because it creates the same runtimes as Objective-C, you should be able to run Swift applications on older versions of those operating systems, not only OS X 10.10 and iOS 8. What you can’t do, and probably never will do, is run Swift apps on competing platforms. No Android, no Windows Phone. Given that the language does target the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch libraries, that’s clearly no surprise.

Most mobile app developers already target iOS first, even though there are more Android devices than iPhones and iPads. Swift won’t change that, and in fact it will likely make iOS development even more attractive.

On the desktop/notebook side, developers writing native software probably target Windows first because of the huge installed base of machines. It’s unlikely that Swift will change behaviors there. But then again, writing desktop/notebook software truly is becoming a niche activity.

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Git control of your software development assets

gitThere are lots of reasons to use Git as your source-code management system. Whether used as a primary system, or in conjunction with an existing legacy repository, I’m going to argue that if you’re not using Git now, you should be at least testing it out.

Basics of Git: It is open source, and runs on Linux, Unix and Windows servers. It is stable. It is solid. It is fast. It is supported by just about every major tool vendor. Developers love Git. Managers love Git.

Not long ago, much of the world standardized on Concurrent Versions System (CVS) as its version control system. Then Subversion (SVN) came along, and the world standardized on that. Yes, yes, I know there are dozens of other version control systems, ranging from Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe and Team Foundation Server to IBM Rational’s ClearCase. Those have always been niche products. Some are very successful niche products, but the industry standards have been CVS and SVN for years.

Along came Git, designed by Linus Torvalds in 2005, now headed up by Junio Hamano. For a brief history of Git, read “The Legacy of Linus Torvalds: Linux, Git, and One Giant Flamethrower,” by Robert McMillan, published in Wired in November 2012. For the official history, see the Git website.

What’s so wonderful about Git? I’ll answer in two ways: industry support and impressive functionality.

For industry support, let me refer you to two new articles by SD Times’ Lisa Morgan. Those stories inspired this column. The first is“How to get Git into the enterprise,” and the other is “Git smart about tools: A Buyers Guide.” You’ll see that nearly every major industry player supports Git—even competing SCM systems have worked to ensure interoperability. That’s a heck of an endorsement, and shows the stability and maturity of the platform.

Don’t take my word for it for the impressive functionality. Instead, let me quote from other bloggers.

Tobias Günther: “Work Offline: What if you want to work while you’re on the move? With a centralized VCS like Subversion or CVS, you’re stranded if you’re not connected to the central repository. With Git, almost everything is possible simply on your local machine: make a commit, browse your project’s complete history, merge or create branches… Git lets you decide where and when you want to work.”

Stephen Ball: “Resolving conflicts is way easier (than SVN): In Git, if I have a private branch from a branch that has been updated with new (conflicting) commits, I can rebase its commits one at a time against the public destination branch. I can resolve conflicts as they arise between my code and the current codebase. This makes dealing with conflicts easy because I get the context of the conflict (my commit message) and only see one conflict at a time.

“In SVN if I merge a branch against another and there are a lot of conflicts, there’s nothing I can do but resolve them all at the same time. What a mess.”

Scott Chacon: “There are tons of fantastic and powerful features in Git that help with debugging, complex diffing and merging, and more. There is also a great developer community to tap into and become a part of and a number of really good free resources online to help you learn and use Git…

“I want to share with you the concept that you can think about version control not as a necessary inconvenience that you need to put up with in order to collaborate, but rather as a powerful framework for managing your work separately in contexts, for being able to switch and merge between those contexts quickly and easily, for being able to make decisions late and craft your work without having to pre-plan everything all the time. Git makes all of these things easy and prioritizes them and should change the way you think about how to approach a problem in any of your projects and version control itself.”

Nicola Paolucci: “If you don’t like speed, being productive and more reliable coding practices, then you shouldn’t use Git.”

Peter Cho: “Most developers would be delighted if they can change their workflow to use Git. Switching over early would be more ideal unless, of course, your SCM relies on a large network of dependent applications. If it’s not viable to change SCM systems, I would highly recommend using it on future projects.

“Git is infamous for having a large suite of tools that even seasoned users need months to master. However, getting into the fundamentals of Git is simple if you’re trying to switch over from SVN or CVS. So give a try sometime.”

Thomas Koch: “Somebody probably already recommended you to switch to Git, because it’s the best VCS. I’d like to go a step further now and talk about the risk you’re taking if you won’t switch soon. By still using SVN (if you’re using CVS you’re doomed anyway), you communicate the following: We’re ignorant about the fact that the rest of the (free) world switched to Git. We don’t invest time to train our developers in new technologies. We don’t care to provide the best development infrastructure. We’re not used to collaborate with external contributors. We’re not aware how much Subversion sucks and that Subversion does not support any decent development process. Yes, our development process most certainly sucks too.”

Günther also wrote, “Go With the Flow: Only dead fish swim with the stream. And sometimes, clever developers do, too. Git is used by more and more well-known companies and Open Source projects: Ruby On Rails, jQuery, Perl, Debian, the Linux Kernel, and many more. A large community often is an advantage by itself because an ecosystem evolves around the system. Lots of tutorials, tools (do I have to mention Tower?) and services make Git even more attractive.”

I’m sure there are arguments against Git. Nearly all the ones I’ve heard have come to me via competing source-code management vendors, not from developers who have actually tried Git for more at least one pilot. If you aren’t using Git, check it out. It’s the present and future of version control systems.

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With Surface Pro 3 Microsoft withdraws from the Tablet Wars

Surface-Pro-3With the May 20 introduction of the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft has unofficially withdrawn from the tablet market. If you’re looking for a tablet computer, your two main platform choices are now Android and iOS.

The Surface Pro 3 isn not an Apple iPad competitor. It doesn’t go up against the Google Nexus family, or the broad Samsung Galaxy product range. Nope.

With the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft has quietly redefined the Surface product line as consisting of ultralight Windows notebooks with touch-screens and removable keyboards. That’s a “tablet” in the sense of the circa-2005 Windows tablets that ran Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. I still have a Fujitsu Lifebook T4010 from that generation, and it was an excellent notebook, with flip-around screen and stylus. Better than a conventional notebook, yes. A device like an iPad or Nexus or Galaxy? Nope.

Yet the Surface Pro family is not inexpensive. It’s priced like high-powered, lightweight notebooks like Apple’s MacBook Air. In some configurations, it’s even pricier. As Microsoft writes in its specifications: “Surface Pro 3 has a 12-inch ClearType Full HD display, fourth-generation Intel Core processor, and up to 8GB of RAM. With up to nine hours of Web-browsing battery life, Surface Pro 3 has all the power, performance and mobility of a laptop in an incredibly lightweight, versatile form.”

Doesn’t sounds like a Galaxy, Nexus or iPad killer. Of course, the Surface can be a tablet sometimes, and that’s Microsoft’s thinking: Most of the time, you want a notebook. Sometimes you want a tablet. Why have two machines?

The complexity of Windows 8.0 (shipped with the original Surface Pro) and the newer Windows 8.1 made the Surface a questionable replacement for a standard tablet. For a short period of time, yes, you can unclick the keyboard and have a walk-around tablet for surfing the Web, watching a movie, reading a book, playing a game or filling in forms.

No comparison to what most of us call tablets: “Surface Pro 3 is a tablet and a laptop: multiple processors, RAM and storage options intersect with a sleek design that, with a simple snap or click, transform the device from a perfectly balanced tablet to a full-functioning laptop and back again— all in a beautiful package that is 30 percent thinner than an 1-inch MacBook Air,” says Microsoft.

The Surface Pro 3 is like an upgraded Fujitsu Lifebook from 2005. Another quote from Microsoft’s announcement:

“So many people carry both a laptop and a tablet but really want just one device that serves all purposes,” said Panos Panay, corporate vice president for Microsoft Surface. “Surface Pro 3 is the tablet that can replace your laptop—packing all the performance of a fully powered laptop into a thin, light and beautifully designed device. You’ll love being able to carry a single device for your next class, workday or weekend getaway knowing you have all the power you need.”

Also, the bevy of configurations—see Microsoft’s pricing sheet—makes this more like a notebook purchase than a tablet. Four storage configurations from 64GB to 512GB. Intel i3, i5 and i7 processors. 4GB or 8GB RAM. USB ports, microSD card reader, Mini DisplayPort, for external monitor: It’s a notebook. Except, of course, that you have to buy the keyboard separately. Bad move, Microsoft.

I am a genuine fan of the Surface Pro. I own the original 2013 model and use it as my main Windows portable. Yeah, it’s a bit slow, and the battery life is terrible, but it’s an excellent notebook. The new Surface Pro 3 is superior. Were I shopping for a new Windows machine, I’d run down to the Microsoft store and buy one.

But it’s not a tablet. There’s no small form-factor version of the Surface Pro 3. There is no upgrade of the truly tablet-class non-pro Surface running Windows RT, which you can pick up for US$299.

Bottom line: Microsoft makes great hardware, and has pulled out of the tablet market.

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Do you want to be a billionaire?

Would you like billion-dollar-billa billion dollars? Software companies, both startups and established firms, are selling like hotcakes. Some are selling for millions of U.S. dollars. Some are selling for billions. While the bulk of the sales price often goes back to venture financiers, a sale can be sweet for equity-holding employees, and even for non-equity employees who get a bonus. Hurray for stock options!

A million U.S. dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is a mind-blowing quantity of money, at least for me. A billion dollars is how much money Sun Microsystems paid to buy MySQL in 2008. Nineteen billion dollars is how much money Facebook is spending to buy the WhatsApp messaging platform in 2014 (see “With social media, it’s about making and spending lots of money”).

I’m going to share some analysis from Berkery Noyes, an investment bank that tracks mergers and acquisitions in the software industry. Here’s info excerpted from their Q1 2014 Software Industry Trends Report:

Software transaction volume declined four percent over the past three months, from 435 to 419. However, this represented a 14 percent increase compared to Q1 2013. Deal value gained 72 percent, from $22.6 billion in Q4 2013 to $38.8 billion in Q1 2014. This rise in aggregate value was attributable in large part to Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp [sic], a cross-platform mobile messaging application, for $16 billion. The top ten largest transactions accounted for 61 percent of the industry’s total value in Q1 2014, compared to 55 percent in Q4 2013 and 38 percent Q1 2013.

The Niche Software segment, which consists of software that is targeted to specific vertical markets, underwent a ten percent volume increase in Q1 2014. In terms of growth areas within the segment, deal volume pertaining to the Healthcare IT market increased 31 percent. Meanwhile, the largest Niche Software transaction during Q1 2014 was Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of Travelclick [sic], which provides cloud-based hotel management software, for $930 million.

According to Berkery Noyes, the niche software market was the largest of four segments defined by the bank’s analysts. You can read about the transactions in the business, consumer and infrastructure software segments in their report.

Why would someone acquire a software company? Sometimes it’s because of the customer base or the strength of a brand name. Sometimes it’s to eliminate a competitor. Sometimes it’s to grab intellectual property (like source code or patents). And sometimes it’s to lock up some specific talent. That’s particularly true of very small software companies that are doing innovative work and have rock-star developers.

Those “acqui-hires” are often lucrative for the handful of employees. They get great jobs, hiring bonuses and, if they have equity, a share of the purchase price. But not always. I was distressed to read about an acquisition where, according to one employee, “Amy”:

Under the terms of Google’s offer, Amy’s startup received enough money to pay back its original investors, plus about $10,000 in cash for each employee. Amy’s CEO was hired as a mid-level manager, and her engineering colleagues were given offers from Google that came with $250,000 salaries and significant signing bonuses. She was left jobless, with only $10,000 and a bunch of worthless stock.

The implication in the story, “The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker,” is that this is sexist: The four male employees were hired by Google, and the one female employee was not.

We don’t know the real story here, and frankly, we probably never will. Still, stories like this ring true because of the brogrammer culture in Silicon Valley, and in the tech industry.

Let’s end with a bit of good news in that regard. According to market research firm Evans Data Corp.:

The number of females in software development has increased by 87% since first being measured in 2001, according to Evans Data’s recently released Developer Marketing 2014 survey.  In 2014, 19.3% of software developers are women, or approximately three and a half million female software developers worldwide.  While today’s number is strong compared to 2001, it is even stronger compared to the years of 2003 to 2009 when the percent of female developers dipped into the single digit range.

We are making progress.

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Read about Carla Schroder’s nerd life – and it’s a good life

Carla-Schroder“I tried working for some tech companies like Microsoft, Tektronix, IBM, and Intel. What a fiasco. I can’t count how many young men with way less experience and skills than me snagged the good fun hands-on tech jobs, while I got stuck doing some kind of crap customer service job. I still remember this guy who got hired as a desktop technician. He was in his 30s, but in bad health, always red and sweaty and breathing hard. It took him forever to do the simplest task, like connecting a monitor or printer. He didn’t know much and was usually wrong, but he kept his job. I busted my butt to show I was serious and already had a good skill set, and would work my tail off to excel, and they couldn’t see past that I wasn’t male. So I got the message, mentally told them to eff off and stuck with freelancing.”

So writes Carla Schroder in her blog post, “My Nerd Life: Too Loud, Too Funny, Too Smart, Too Fat” on linux.com. Her story is an important one for female techies – and all techies. Read it.

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You won’t believe what they are saying about tech women

'Rosetta (Young Girl Sitting Thinking Seated on Ground sculptures/statu' by Jenny Wynne JonesTechnology is a rewarding career track. It also can be an incredibly hostile career track, especially for the females of the species.

Here are 13 links to what they’re saying about women in tech – plus a bonus off-topic one.

 If you’re a woman – you’ve gotta read this. If you’re not a woman – you’re gotta read this too.